A - the size of the storage batteries (and there would necessarily be hundreds of them) would be tremendous and outstrip the entire supply of lithium worldwide just for the US.
B - the environmental hazards would be worse than all the pollution that exists today. Re= the battery facility fire in LA during the winter fires.
C - Such a system would be requiring a capacity in the terawatt-hours (TWh).
D - a 100 mile by 100 mile concentration of solar panels struck by a huge storm, lightning, tornado, or fire would blackout the entire nation.
E - Pick a 10,000 SQ Mile area of any state that is unoccupied, build this system, and not destroy an entire ecology? White Sands? Zuni reservation? Navajo Reservation? Painted Desert? Which Indian reservation gets sacrificed? Tohono O'Odham? Ft. Apache? Gila River? Or Kofa Natl Refuge? Who gets sacrificed for the "good of the nation"?
F - Solar panels are best for home use and little more. And even those destabilize the grid. When a huge amount of wind hit the NW, it generated a huge amount of electricity from wind generators which, by law, was required to be used or pay for anyway. So, in such events, the entire base grid must shut down while wind is monitored by the second and idled gas and coal plants are still maintaining steam pressure to respond instantly if the wind suddenly slows. It is totally inefficient and wrecks the efficiency of the entire grid.
Remember when the entire grid was shut down a few years ago? The blackout of 2003 started with a mere limb on a power line. It was a hot day and people were turning on AC. the powerlines got hot which expands and the lines sag. One sagged into a limb and the automatic shutdown triggered an effort to maintain power on other lines that now were overloaded. This resulted in a cascade of sequential shutdowns that affected several states and even up into Canada. It was a rolling blackout. More than 508 generating units at 265 power plants shut down during the outage & It took hours to restore. That's because you have to energize each line as you slowly ramp up the generating power.
